The Getty Villa in Pacific
Palisades, California

The Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades is every bit as
interesting and absorbing as The Getty in Los Angeles. And both are free
to see. Even if you had to pay, it would remain the world class museum
worth seeing.

Pacific Palisades,
Calif.--Take a day and see
The Getty Villa, by all means. I had not read up on it, except to know
it was all the buzz when it re-opened to the public after being closed
for nearly a decade. Now that I've visited this rare gem, I hope to return and
spend more time reading about the artifacts, statues, coins, jewelry and
even pristine, beautiful glassware preserved from more than 2000 years
ago. Every
day items, decor such as vases and vessels, metal ornamental bowls and
other rare items bring the cultures and people to life right before your
eyes. It paints a picture of a societies that fortunately did something
we do not today...they carved their messages in metal and stone,
preserving them for thousands of years of generations to
follow.

Think about it! If
our Internet system and other artifacts that comprised our development
vanished in some catastrophic earth event, what chance would there be
for later civilizations to find and decipher the remnants of what we
believed was so significant in our daily lives? Stone, marble and metal
all seem so basic to our existence, and it is through them that we gaze
back in time. The Getty Villa is astounding for its collections,
though some pieces will be replaced by 2010, and head
back to Italy where there originated.

Wealth and luxury,
simplicity and beauty are immortalized in stone. J. Paul Getty was one
of the richest men in the world, making much of his profit from oil in
the vein of another art collector, Henry Huntington. Getty was
wealthier, however. He fell in love with Italian art and architecture
and collected so many sculptures and archaeologically significant pieces
that he felt compelled to share them with the world, thus opening his
home once a week to the public for viewing.

Getty Villa, which is
open to the public free, is a facility he never lived in, but had build
to house a portion of his expansive art collection. It is a copy of a
Roman country house that one might have seen in Pompeii, Italy just
before Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum,
Italy, is the property which was buried in volcanic lava and ash, that
Getty copied as the ideal setting in which to place his valued
artifacts. Since the largest portion of that property is still buried,
architects were required to create composite designs integrating a mix
of Roman houses from several Italian locales--Herculaneum, Pompeii, and
Stabiae.

Terrazzo flooring, a
room of 14 colors of marble called Room of Colored Marbles, a grand
marble staircase connecting the two floors of the Museum building, and
the Greek, Roman and Etruscan antiquities will rekindle your interest in
history. It's hard to believe that so many items have been preserved in
mint condition. In Southern California where earthquakes are guaranteed
to occur, it's quite likely that preservation of the artifacts includes
cases and displays that are created to house the priceless collections
in a manner that hopefully can protect them even better than the
devastation some survived in the Mt. Vesuvius eruption.